Welcome to Texas justice: You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.

Monday, October 01, 2012

TDCJ backs off firing of CO with prisoner as Facebook friend

Kudos to The Back Gate for reporting a story that went viral after the Houston Press and the Austin Statesman's Mike Ward picked it up about TDCJ being forced to reinstate correctional officer Heath Lara, who was fired for having a prisoner with whom he'd attended high school friended on Facebook. (It always seems odd to me to use "friend" as a verb, but such is the Facebook usage.) According to The Back Gate:

After the termination, Lara did a little investigating of his own. He
located and documented a dozen other current TDCJ employees that were
also friends with the offender in question. All of whom grew up and went
to Huntsville area schools together and had some connection. But it was
one individual facebook friend in particular present on the offender's
account that may have swayed administrators on how to deal with the
issue. That friend being none other then current TDCJ -CFO (Chief Financial Officer, Director of finance) Jerry McGinty.
As Lara presented his newly discovered information at his mediation
hearing to attempt to get his job back, the tides seemed to have turned.
In a memo the Backgate received through open records, the Huntsville
Human Resources headquarters sent an electronic email regarding Sgt.
Lara to others in their office, and the Regional Office. " Based on
action by the agency representative, the recommendation for dismissal
has been overturned and all charges have been dismissed."

Mike Ward added that:

Even though Lara won his case, [AFSCME local President Lance] Lowry and others say other prison
employees haven’t been so lucky.

According to complaints by several
employees in recent months: at least three other corrections workers
have been terminated or disciplined in the past year for having Facebook
friends who are convicts or ex-convicts; several wardens are reported
to have initiated investigations into guards’ Facebook accounts; and
several employees say they have been ordered to “unfriend” anyone they
don’t personally know.

Some guards consider Facebook a bad idea in their line of work.

“I
don’t know why anyone in the prison business would want to be on
Facebook, with their family photos and everything out there for anyone
to see,” said retired Huntsville prison guard John Wheeler, echoing
sentiments of current officers who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
“You’re just asking for trouble, on the job and off.”

Despite the policy change, critics say the current policy is still ripe for abuse.

“The
only way the agency does anything now is if someone rats someone else
off,” said Brian Olsen, executive director of a correctional employees
union that represents more than 6,000 prison workers.

Even so,
prison officials say the change should resolve a big issue. “To violate
the policy has to be more than just ‘friend’ status on Facebook,” Clark
said.

Ward's item caused numerous national outlets to pick up the story, but regrettably he didn't credit The Back Gate with breaking the news, though they've been the main outlet digging into it. "Over the past three months the Backgate has monitored the issues
regarding Facebook and found even more cases of harassment, selected
enforcement, and odd punishments. Contrary to what TDCJ has stated
publicly, units are still asking for employee social media passwords,
and if you fail to hand them over you better look for another line of
work," said their latest report.

Notably, Facebook earlier this year criticized and threatened to sue employers who require employees to hand over their passwords, as TDCJ has allegedly sometimes done, The Back Gate maintains that, "Most of the inquiries [for Facebook passwords] made by administrators don't even seem to pertain
to suspected employee/offender relationships but is a way to see what
the employee is saying about the agency, or it's administrators."

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

About 20 years ago, I was involved in an administrative action against Southwestern Bell before the PUC regarding terms of use for their phone lines. One of the things they asked for in discovery was a list of the online users of our computer systems. We argued that info was the result of a private communication between two parties. After we threatened to both go to the feds and bring a lawsuit, they backed off their request and never got that info from us.

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